Sunday 3 September 2023

“Other Alices: A fresh journey through the looking-glass” by Susanna Johnston (TLS)

It’s an amusing piece, of course, yet it’s based on a lot of speculations that mostly originated from the murky waters “what was missed” (i.e. Aposiopesis). As a literary exercise, it heavily reminds me of Byatt’s works.
If the cavalier young man of The Story of Elizabeth was, as I believe, based on Dodgson, five years older than Anny, it was his behaviour that had led to her nervous collapse in 1861. The story expresses her grief and incomprehension at what seems to have been his sudden, mortifying defection from their affectionate relationship. While this must be largely a matter of conjecture [indeed —E.,T.], carefully salvaged traces in what remains of the primary sources, exasperatingly elusive and fragmentary, read together with the substantial body of their work, arguably suggest that neither she nor Dodgson could help writing about each other repeatedly, if cryptically. ©
Yet I still doubt that the influence was *that* direct:
The inhabitants of Looking-glass World are red and white chess pieces. The first piece Alice meets is the Red Queen, and the whole design of the book turns on Alice’s relationship with her, “the cause of all the mischief”. It is strange that the Red Queen has never been recognized as Mrs Cameron, particularly since Tenniel’s illustration draws on her own photographic portrait. She was, indubitably, the Red Queen of Freshwater – both Anny and Mrs Tennyson remarked on her red clothes – and almost beyond parody. Her bossiness was legendary. Her great-niece remembered how she “was liable to burst into Farringford at any moment […] that strange, plump little figure in its flowing robes”. No one escaped her constant injunctions, least of all her daughter, who was urged in a letter (Kent Archives): “do my sweet child take pains at all times to hold yourself nicely and not to shrug up your shoulders as you are so much in the habit of doing.” The Red Queen’s injunctions to Alice are strikingly similar: “Look up, speak nicely, and don’t twiddle your fingers all the time.” ©
TL;DR: I am not convinced enough.

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